Ringfort (Rath), Carbad More, Co. Mayo

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Ringfort (Rath), Carbad More, Co. Mayo

What makes this particular patch of Mayo pasture quietly arresting is not the ringfort itself in isolation, but the company it keeps.

Within a radius of roughly 400 metres, three other raths sit in the surrounding landscape, and a court tomb, one of Ireland's oldest monument types, lies the same distance to the east-southeast. That density of prehistoric and early medieval activity, all within comfortable walking distance of one another, suggests a stretch of ground that people returned to, and organised their lives around, across several millennia.

A rath is a ringfort, the enclosed farmstead of an early medieval Irish landowner, typically dating from somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries. This one at Carbad More sits on a terrace on the east-facing slope of a ridge, looking out over the estuary of the River Moy and Killala Bay. The enclosed platform measures roughly 20.5 metres east to west and 21.4 metres north to south, rising about a metre above the surrounding field. On the western arc, a low remnant of the original enclosing bank survives, with a rough inner kerb of stones still visible along the north-west section. The eastern side of the scarp is noticeably higher, built up to compensate for the natural fall of the ground, and here the stonework has slumped considerably over time, with large boulders scattered at its base. A wide, poorly defined gap on the west side may represent the original entrance. There was once an external fosse, a defensive ditch, running around the outside; faint traces of it were recorded in 1995, but by a subsequent inspection in 2017 it had become indistinguishable from the surrounding ground.

The site sits in pasture and is covered in long grass, thistles, and nettles, with two small twisted hawthorn bushes growing from the scarp on the south-east side. A farm track runs immediately to the north-north-east. The eastern view from the terrace edge, out towards the Moy estuary and Killala Bay, gives a reasonable sense of why someone would have chosen this particular shelf of ground, with good sightlines in the direction most exposed to the natural fall of the terrain.

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Pete F
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